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Google Plus Boosts Executive Careers (Here's How)

Social media is one of the most powerful new tools for CEOs and other executives. It helps you understand customers, markets, and the competition.

It can make you better at what you do.

Few executives use social media, but they should. This is especially true for Google Plus—and I’ll tell you why.

In addition to your company using social media for all the reasons companies do, you should consider personally using social media as an opportunity for advancement and real-time market research.

Each major social network tends to excel at different kinds of interaction:

Facebook gets a lot of attention because it’s not only the biggest social network, it’s also the best place to connect with people you already know. That’s great, but chit-chatting with Aunt Mildred isn’t going to make you better at your profession.

Twitter gets a lot of attention because it’s celebrity-friendly. It’s so easy to toss off a quick factoid, observation or link; and enables users to follow a large number of brands and people. Twitter is fun, but following Justin Bieber isn’t going to alert you to new market opportunities.

Google+ is the best site, however, for talking about ideas: an emphasis that has less mass-market appeal, but more relevance to someone like you who wants to have meaningful discussions about your professional interests.

Social Media For Execs? Really, Mike? True social networking isn’t what those “social media experts” do. Real social networking is when you personally start and seek out conversations about your areas of interest, then engage with others about those topics in order to gain knowledge, understanding and influence.

I’m going to tell you exactly how to get started with a method of engagement that works well only on Google+, and will tap you directly into every conversation on Google+ related to your business (or interests).

How To Do Google+ ‘Persistent Engagement’ When people first approach Google+, they can be overwhelmed either by the amount of content they see (or the lack of content, depending on where they look). Your own profile has nothing at first. The “What’s Hot” list looks massive but largely irrelevant.

But these first superficial views mask a deep ocean of professional content and conversation that exists inside Google+.

The way to look at Google+ is that it’s all about search (which makes sense, since this is Google we’re talking about). Your own profile, your circles, the What’s Hot: All of these streams are search results, except Google has done the search query for you.

1. Engagement Using Search The best place to start—to dive right into the deep end—is with search.

When you’re looking for content related to your career, profession or business, create one or more “search streams” to deliver all relevant conversations on a silver platter every day.

First, use the Google+ search feature to search for your company’s brand, product or subject area. Experiment with different queries. Once you’re getting a search query returning good results, click on the “More” menu and choose “Google+ posts.” Then click the “Best of” menu and choose “Most recent.” Finally, click the “Save this search” button. (You can set up additional saved searches in the same way.)

Then, in future, you can find your search right in there with all your other Google+ streams. Choose “Home” from the menu on the left. Click “More” on the top menu to see all your streams. Choose the search stream you just created.

This stream will update instantly, every time there’s a new post or conversation related to your search. Scan these posts and interact as you will by clicking the [+1] button or, more powerfully, adding a comment. Just add your two cents, ask for more details, even correct someone who’s mistaken. Just follow your curiosity.

As you discover other users who are knowledgeable and valuable, go ahead and circle them by hovering your mouse pointer over their name, then clicking on the “Add” button that pops up. Over time, you’ll collect a small army of valuable resources whom you will come to personally know over repeated engagements.

As you may have noticed, these search stream posts are fleeting. And that’s where the “persistent” part of “Persistent Engagement” comes in.

2. Persistent Participation Simply use this link to enable Google+ to show you all the conversations you’ll want to stay in touch with. (I recommend adding both your search streams and also the link above to your browser’s bookmarks bar for easy, instant and daily access.)

This view of Google+ shows you all the conversations you’ve engaged in that are continuing, all the “mentions” of you specifically, which is often used to direct a question to someone personally, and posts that have been shared with you deliberately.

To me, this is my “Home” stream: the one I turn to the most and which provides the greatest benefit.

By simply going to this page, you’ll be able to sustain your participation in conversations indefinitely, without having to sift through conversations you’re not part of. Even two-year-old conversations resurface into this stream when a latecomer chimes in. You’ll never lose active conversations.

Whenever you want to opt out of a conversation, just click the drop-down menu to the right of the post and choose “Mute post.”

The Bottom Line Make “Persistent Engagement” using these two views—the search stream and the secret notifications stream—part of your daily routine.

The benefits are endless education, keeping of your finger on the pulse of your industry, your customers, and your business.

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::Your posting, when combined with G+, add to your Google Authorship and rank you higher. :: Communities are a great source of interaction and less link-dumping that other sites. :: There is continued improvement with the site. :: Hangouts are now a viable way to monetize your message, and as an alternative form of communication (you don’t need Skype anymore!)

It’s good to emphasize the possibilities of Google+ for management & executives. It’s insightful to see employees, customers, competitors and others talking about a brand or business. Much possibilities for engagement and a continuous learning curve.